Harvard Theological Review articles from July 2008

Harvard Theological Review archives from July 2008

HTR Centennial celebration: words of welcome.(Harvard Theological Review)(Speech)
July 1, 2008... Good morning and welcome to all of you who have gathered on this extremely proud day for Harvard Divinity School to mark the centennial celebration of the HTR, the Harvard Theological Review. I am honored to have been asked by our Editor,...

HTR Centennial Anniversary: greetings and introduction.(Speech)
July 1, 2008... At the beginning of this ceremony I would like to express my gratitude to Dean William A. Graham for his ongoing interest in Harvard Theological Review and for his generosity in helping us to organize this Centennial Anniversary. I am...

Address: a tour of Harvard in 1908.(Speech)
July 1, 2008... Ladies and Gentlemen, I am here as the best that could be got, which is to say that there are at least three others who would be much better suited to the task assigned to me than myself. Two are dead, my great teacher George Williams, who...

Working on the indices of the Harvard Theological Review (1908-2008).(Viewpoint essay)
July 1, 2008... In discussing the work of indexing the Harvard Theological Review, I shall begin by describing the organization and development of the project, and the various ideals and principles involved in its design. Then I shall show what some specific...

New Testament scholarship through one hundred years of the Harvard Theological Review.(Viewpoint essay)
July 1, 2008... In order to answer the question of the involvement of Harvard Theological Review in the publication of essays relating to the New Testament, I have gone through all the published indices that were issued by the journal. The first index was...

Original and ongoing theological issues through one hundred years of the Harvard Theological Review.
July 1, 2008... The first words of the inaugural issue of the Harvard Theological Review in January 1908 were those of Francis Greenwood Peabody, Plummer Professor of Christian Morals and sometime Dean of the Faculty of Divinity, from 190l-1906. An ordained...

The future of the Harvard Theological Review in a global and interreligious age.
July 1, 2008... We celebrate the Harvard Theological Review's 100th anniversary with admiration for this splendid journal; but we may also share the uncertainty Francis Greenwood Peabody expressed in the opening paragraph of the first article of the first...

Borderlands.(Brief article)
July 1, 2008... In its centenary year, the Harvard Theological Review stands at a threshold that reflects Harvard Divinity School's renewed determination to do justice to the cultural and ethnic diversity of our contemporary world, to foster...

Borderlands and the "biblical hurricane": images and stories of Latin American rhythms of life.(Viewpoint essay)
July 1, 2008... Macondo was already a fearful whirlwind of dust and rubble being spun about by the wrath of the biblical hurricane when Aureliano skipped eleven pages so as not to lose time with facts he knew only too well, and he began to decipher the...

Between biography and ethnography.(Critical essay)
July 1, 2008... My point of departure in this essay is David Carrasco's Convocation Address at the Harvard Divinity School in September 2006. Speaking of the borderlands between Mexico and the United States, Carrasco projects an image of a vexed and...

Between logocentrism and lococentrism: Alambrista challenges to traditional theology.(Essay)
July 1, 2008... "Olhe, um terrorista!" yelled the construction worker as I passed. I was living in Salvador, Brazil, where eighty percent of the population identifies as something other than white. Though not sharing the same ancestry as my neighbors, I...

The emerging distinction between theology and religion at nineteenth-century Harvard University.
July 1, 2008... Many scholars of religion who teach today in nondenominational schools may take it for granted that these schools have no institutional mandate to espouse a particular religious agenda. Yet, how did this relatively new approach become common...

A measured faith: Edwin Starbuck, William James, and the scientific reform of religious experience.(Critical essay)
July 1, 2008... A number of recent studies have drawn attention to how the study of religion and religious seeking were intertwined in European and American cultures in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Ann Taves, Leigh Schmidt and Hans Kippenberg, for...

Negative theologies and the cross.(Critical essay)
July 1, 2008... So many postmodern theologians are busy retrieving "negative theology," while others label such retrievals "misconstruals," that observers might be tempted to conclude that there was, or is, such a single thing as "negative theology." Yet...

Ritual efficacy, Hasidic mysticism and "useless suffering" in the Warsaw Ghetto.
July 1, 2008... "Learn to think with pain." (1) Between November 1940 and April 1943, nearly four hundred thousand Jews were imprisoned in the Warsaw Ghetto and systematically murdered. Among them was Rabbi Kalonymos Shapira (1889-1943), who had founded...

Restricting the Republic: France, the veil, and religious freedom.(Summaries of Doctoral Dissertations)
July 1, 2008... This dissertation examines the debate around the banning of the Muslim headscarf in public schools in France. It employs an ethnographic methodology and draws on literature in anthropology, political, and legal theory, and religious studies....

Ledi Sayadaw, Abhidhamma, and the development of the modern insight meditation movement in Burma.(Summaries of Doctoral Dissertations)(Critical essay)
July 1, 2008... Scholars in Buddhist Studies and related fields have long acknowledged the Burmese monk Ledi Sayadaw (1846-1923) as an important figure in the start of the modern insight meditation (vipassana) movement in Burma, yet no scholarly work to date...

The unlikely Buddhologist Mou Zongsan (1909-1995).(Summaries of Doctoral Dissertations)(Critical essay)
July 1, 2008... Mou Zongsan (1909-1995), the leading light of Chinese philosophy in the last century, has influenced the study of philosophy and religion in greater China as deeply as Heidegger did in Europe and he is remembered for trying to revive...

Dressing for the resurrection: dress as embodied theology in Tertullian of Carthage.(Summaries of Doctoral Dissertations)(Critical essay)
July 1, 2008... Why in the midst of heated third-century debates about creation and resurrection did the Christian writer, Tertullian of Carthage, pause to write to his community about the seemingly mundane matters like women's toiletries and veiling or...

Faqirs in the colony: Rama Tirtha, Sundar Singh, and comparative sainthood in the Punjab (1849-1929).(Summaries of Doctoral Dissertations)(Critical essay)
July 1, 2008... This dissertation studies the construction of sainthood in the colonial Punjab (1849-1929). It focuses on the lives of two ascetic "saints": the Hindu Rama Tirtha (1873-1906) and the Sikh convert to Christianity Sundar Singh (1889-1929?). My...

Sainte-Anne-duPetit-Cap: the making of an early modern shrine.(Summaries of Doctoral Dissertations)
July 1, 2008... My dissertation examines the making of the shrine to Saint Anne at Petit-Cap (now Beaupre) and situates the development of this devotion in the latter half of the seventeenth century within the received tradition of scholarship on early...

Abortion and the politics of God: patient narratives and public rhetoric in the American abortion debate.(Summaries of Doctoral Dissertations)(Brief article)
July 1, 2008... In this dissertation I seek to understand more about the abortion experiences of women, who for political and religious reasons, oppose abortion. Yet they undergo one or many abortion procedures anyway. I study conservative Christian...

"Traditionary religion": the great awakening and the shaping of native cultures in southern New England, 1736-1776.(Summaries of Doctoral Dissertations)(Brief article)
July 1, 2008... This dissertation explores the ways in which religious practices and religious conversions became important sites of cultural negotiation between American Indians of southern New England and their Anglo-European counterparts in the eighteenth...

Apparent darkness: Jean-Luc Marion's retrieval of the Greek apophatic tradition.(Summaries of Doctoral Dissertations)(Critical essay)
July 1, 2008... This study analyzes the use of patristic sources, specifically those of Gregory of Nyssa and Dionysius the Areopagite, within the writing of Jean-Luc Marion (1946-). This analysis functions as an illuminating lens through which I evaluate a...

Holy desires: an ecclesiological study of the Rite of Consecration to a Life of Virginity for Women Living in the World.(Summaries of Doctoral Dissertations)
July 1, 2008... The Rite of Consecration to a Life of Virginity for Women Living in the World, ancient custom then liturgical rite of the Roman Catholic Church, dates from the first centuries of the Christian Church, and is used by the Church today. The...

The sages and the star-child: an introduction to the Revelation of the Magi, an ancient Christian apocryphon.(Summaries of Doctoral Dissertations)(Critical essay)
July 1, 2008... This study analyzes a poorly-known ancient Christian apocryphal writing, the Revelation of the Magi. This document purports to be the personal testimony of the biblical Magi on the coming of Christ, and is the longest and most complex...

Jesus' transfiguration and the believers' transformation: a study of the transfiguration and its development in early Christian writings.(Summaries of Doctoral Dissertations)(Brief article)
July 1, 2008... In my dissertation, I examine the Transfiguration story of Jesus found in the narrative accounts of the Synoptic Gospels and trace its trajectories of multiple readings through the first two centuries of the Christian era, especially focusing...

Ethical revaluation in the thought of Santideva.(Summaries of Doctoral Dissertations)(Critical essay)
July 1, 2008... This dissertation examines the idea of ethical revaluation--taking things we normally see a good for our flourishing and seeing them instead as neutral or bad, and vice versa--in the Mahayana Buddhist thinker Santideva. It shows how...

Ekklesia: 1 Corinthians in the context of ancient democratic discourse.(Summaries of Doctoral Dissertations)(Critical essay)
July 1, 2008... This dissertation investigates and reconstructs a vital discourse centered on the democratic, civic ekklesia in the early Roman Empire, demonstrating this discourse's place in the rhetorical construction of the early Christian letter 1...

'Leaning over the abyss': Raissa Maritain, the allure of suffering, and the French Catholic revival.(Summaries of Doctoral Dissertations)(Critical essay)
July 1, 2008... Although the name Raissa Maritain (1883-1960) occasionally surfaces in the study of French Catholicism alongside that of her celebrated husband Jacques Maritain, her own writings have received scarce critical attention. This omission is...

The problem of the land is the problem of the woman: a genealogy of ecofeminism at Grailville.(Summaries of Doctoral Dissertations)(Case study)
July 1, 2008... This dissertation brings current theoretical understandings of the relationship between religion, gender, and ecology to bear upon a sociohistorical analysis of the evolution of the U.S. Grail at its main center in southwestern Ohio at...

Transfiguring sexual difference in Maximus the Confessor.(Summaries of Doctoral Dissertations)(Critical essay)
July 1, 2008... This dissertation studies the conception of sexual difference in the thought of Maximus the Confessor (580-662 C.E.). It focuses in particular upon several enigmatic phrases in Ambiguum 41, which describe first the human person and then Jesus...

Cosmic theodicy: origen on the problem of evil.(Summaries of Doctoral Dissertations)(Critical essay)
July 1, 2008... In my dissertation I examine Origen of Alexandria's (185-254 C.E.) treatment of the problem of evil. I undertake a major re-evaluation of the salient themes of his theodicy, which include the pre-existence of souls, the fall, creation, and...

No closure: Catholic practice and Boston's parish shutdowns.(Summaries of Doctoral Dissertations)
July 1, 2008... In 2004 the Roman Catholic Archdiocese of Boston announced the closure of more than eighty of its 357 parishes. In the months that followed, parishioners at several closing parishes took over and occupied their churches in opposition to the...

Just looking: theological language, ethics, and photographs of violence.(Summaries of Doctoral Dissertations)(Critical essay)
July 1, 2008... This dissertation has two parts. In part one I analyze the theological language that emerges in the writings of three theorists of photography: Roland Barthes, John Berger, and Susan Sontag. They employ theological language when writing about...

Desire divided: nature and grace in the neo-Thomism of Pierre Rousselot.(Summaries of Doctoral Dissertations)(Critical essay)
July 1, 2008... This study explores the early work of the French neo-Thomist Pierre Rousselot, S.J. (1878-1915). Rousselot, a theologian of major significance in twentieth-century Catholic thought, influenced Henri de Lubac, Joseph Marechal, Karl Rahner, and...

"No longer I": Paul, Dionysius the Areopagite, and the Apophasis of the Self.(Summaries of Doctoral Dissertations)(Critical essay)(Brief article)
July 1, 2008... In this dissertation I argue that the pseudonym, Dionysius the Areopagite, and the influence of Paul together constitute the best interpretive lens for understanding the aims and purposes of the Corpus Dionysiacum [CD] and its pseudonymous...

Practice and emptiness in the discourse record of Ruru Jushi, Yan Bing (d. 1212), a Chan Buddhist Layman of the Southern Song.(Summaries of Doctoral Dissertations)(Critical essay)
July 1, 2008... In this dissertation I studied the works of one Chinese Buddhist layman, Yan Bing [TEXT NOT REPRODUCIBLE IN ASCII], also known as Layman Ruru (Ruru jushi [TEXT NOT REPRODUCIBLE IN ASCII], d. 1212). His extant writings survive in two editions,...

Protestant sainthood: martyrdom and the meaning of sanctity in early New England.(Summaries of Doctoral Dissertations)(Brief article)
July 1, 2008... This dissertation examines the rhetoric of martyrdom in seventeenth-century Protestant culture, exploring how Puritans, Baptists, and Quakers imagined themselves within biblical and historical narratives of persecution both to strengthen...